


Brother In Arms

by obfuscatress



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, intra-canon extension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:14:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21824974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obfuscatress/pseuds/obfuscatress
Summary: Jim goes to see him one last time.
Relationships: Bill Haydon/Jim Prideaux
Comments: 4
Kudos: 108





	Brother In Arms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Damned_Writers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damned_Writers/gifts).



> I edited this tipsy as a reward for finishing uni assignments. Sorry in advance.

Sarratt is dirtier than he remembers. Coated in uneven fog, the huts shiver in the night like concrete outhouses. Jim feels cold just looking at them and wonders if it was the same for Toby when it was him behind the fence two years ago.

But the chill doesn’t last long. There sweeps Smiley’s figure across the gravel path - driven but slow, something mournful written in his silhouette. And then, not long after, comes Bill. Bill in his jeans and a soft-worn cotton shirt; he’d never have been seen in the Circus like this, but Jim’s had the privilege of knowing him since long before then: dressing for rugby practise at the end of a still-warm bed (his here, Bill’s there), ranting about college politics while Jim tuned him out to continue the dog-eared novel on his nightstand.

The thought of Bill years ago superimposed on the wretched figure trawling the grounds now burns. It’s the ghost of his branding reawakened - Bill sat on the edge of an old bridge, one leg dangling off the side, the other pulled close so he could rest his chin on his knee and watch Jim skip stones across the water, Jim’s fingertips tingling with the warmth of the look.

“Listen,” Bill had said, nothing more than a casual murmur. Still, the words that came after pulled Jim into a fatal orbit that revolved around secrecy, state, and the perfect silence surrounding Bill’s attention.

It was so easy - the way he swung around on his heel mid monologue, cigarette burning away absentmindedly in the ashtray because Bill had gotten lost in the cross word again - so settled, how could Jim have smelled trouble until the acrid note of gunpowder was already in the air?

Hurtling around the same stratosphere at five hundred miles an hour, it was impossible to see, but Bill had been the rot in his life for a lot longer than the years following the bullets. He’s had plenty of time to revisit the signs previously ignored: Ann’s perfume on him the night Jim had posed to him the notion of a mole, still too fond of Bill for his own good after forty years mottled with as many affairs (Jan, the sailor boy, tha enigmatic professor at Oxford Bill toyed with the spring before Jim appeared on the scene). He’d never wanted to call it heartbreak, but in the confines of a raw-walled cell, the ache was hard to ignore even amid the bullet tracts in his back.

He thinks of Bill’s eyes that last night. He’d written the slipping of his gaze in the foyer off as impatience, too focused on delivering his own warning to register the one Bill was trying to signal back at him. He’d been so preoccupied trying to earn strangers’ false trust over the past decades that he’d never taken the time to unlearn his unwavering devotion to Bill and, in the end, that was what they’d put down as the sin on his tab before they shipped him off to hell.

* * *

It’s nighttime before Jim returns to the compound. The fog has resolved into thin shreds of mist that blur the harsh correctional lights here and there, but do the rest of the place no favours. The light is so cool, the grass has a blue hue (algal almost), matted and wet from the heavy rain that had forced him off the premises earlier.

Jim is not yet certain what he intends to do here, but he’s brought a gun anyway. With no clearance and no standing in the circus he can’t simply waltz in through the main entrance and demand to speak to Bill. Of all the people hungry for answers from Bill, his name is far from making it onto the list of the select few granted the privilege to talk to him.

Once upon a time, it was Bill’s prerogative to dole out his own time, but neither of them is what they once were. Bill, once a bright eyed patriot is now cast as the villain of the play and Jim, nothing more than a crooked man with a limp, has long given up on the heroics of breaking and entering for the greater good (or, before he’d had a sense of that, Bill Haydon).

No, that fight had left him the first morning back in England after the Czecho stunt when the raw, serrated hope that things would turn out alright somehow if only he could speak to Bill had left him. Even stiff from the pain, his bullet wounds oozing with pus from the effects of heavy duty antibiotics they’d given him, he had been so certain of Bill.

That was, until Toby Esterhase’s leporine face and tense shoulders. “Don’t look at me like that, Jim,” he said after delivering Control’s last order, “I am only the messenger.”

“Yes,” though Jim and failed to fathom how Control could ever have suspected a vacuous little man like that of being the mole Gerald.

And well, between that visit, Control’s death, and Smiley’s retirement, it hadn’t taken Jim long to suss out which of the remaining suspects was the culprit. Then he’d locked the name in a box with his gun and buried them in the dirt at Thursgood’s.

He’d told himself to simply forget - as if he could, as if his shoulder didn’t ache day after day, his spine broken by the weight of this particular betrayal.

By the main compound, a door opens to let out a guard, the silhouette of his vested, multi-pocketed gear a jagged thing. Moments later, a flicker of a flame, then the quiet ember of a cigarette wasting away in the dark. There’s a murmur, but Jim can’t make out who it’s coming from until the second figure steps out of the shadow of the building and then Jim cannot not unsee it even if he wanted to.

The striped pyjamas (always the bloody striped pyjamas), he should have guessed. Loafers gathering moisture as they’re being dragged through the grass, the overcoat flapping beneath the knees. Jim can’t help but stare at the glint of a metal spectacle rim caught in the light. Bill’s curls are haloed in the light, angelic if it weren’t for the harsh tone.

Before Jim knows it, he’s moving.

Bill walks slowly with his hands in his pockets. He’s never been one to hurry and never seemed to learn the art of worrying. Perhaps that was how he’d managed to send Jim off that night: not with outright malice but an optimistic blindness to his own hubris.

In their younger days, Bill used to work himself up into a fanatic speech sometimes before he took a deep breath and let it all slip with a self-conscious laugh.  _ Look at me _ , the huff would say, _ harping on about nothing _ .

God, what Jim would give to be twenty again, sat on the rotting six-foot dock bobbing on the little lake in the forest, his hair plastered to his forehead from their swim while Bill had already been rendered wild by a towel.

Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s on his knees in the shrubbery, one eye pressed shut, the safety off the weapon and Bill in his sights, ambling down the hill. Jim could end it right here, and yet, his finger wavers over the trigger.

Up by the compound, the orange spark flies away in an arc before the door to the guard’s station opens once more and the uniformed figure disappears back inside. There are supposed to be more of them out here patrolling the parameter, but it’s a job no one likes on the best of days and on one like this, it’s downright impossible to sell. As far as Jim can tell, it’s just him and Bill now.

_ Like old times _ , he thinks, the bitter taste of the words still new to him. Had Bill known they were going to shoot him? That’s what he’s been asking himself every night since it happened and here Bill is: Waiting to be asked.

Jim makes his way to fence and works around to the section he’d decided would be best to cut through if he were to break in. Slipping through the wounded fence puts him right in Bill’s path, ahead in the shadows.

“I thought you might visit,” Bill says once he’s in earshot. It’s his measured, confidential voice that is quiet even in the confines of a library, and Jim’s agitation simultaneously melts and bristles.

“Strangely enough, I had the same notion about you when I was here last and yet it was Toby who gave me the marching order.”

“I couldn’t get away from the Circus at a time like that, you must understand.”

“Mmh, I suppose Centre would have thought it rather foolish of you. Tell me,” Jim says, the ambulance at Brno coming back to him in ugly shreds of white light, “why did you make such a fuss of getting me back when you were working for the Russians all along?”

He can’t keep his jaw from clenching, a gesture that’s horribly telling of the hurt that took from him what the bullets couldn’t.

Bill holds his gaze for a moment before he looks away, mute. His repentance has always been poor and as a result infuriating, so Jim draws his gun and says again, more forcefully: “Tell me!”

He wishes his voice would sound steadier, that he could divorce himself from desperation, but he’s still the same man who turned up at his best friend’s flat to warm him of a boogie man he didn’t believe existed  _ just in case _ .

“It was you,” Bill says finally with a shrug as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. “I couldn’t leave you there.”

“And yet, after all that trouble, you sent Esterhase.”

“Jim,” Bill says in a bored, afflicted voice as though they’ve had this argument a hundred times over. He steps closer, into the shade where the gun is only inches from him and his eyes are so dark they’re imperceptible but for a single speck of light.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what I wanted. That it was never enough for me.”

“I did always find your loyalty to Queen and Country rather suspicious, you know.” To think, all this time, perhaps Jim had been his longest, most persistent cause for devotion after all. “I never could have imagined getting shot in the back could be the kinder of two betrayals.”

He doesn’t have to see Bill’s smile to know it’s there.

Their silence is coloured by the pale plumes of their breaths in the night air.

“Well, you came here to finish a job,” says Bill. “Better get on with it.”

“Since when are you in a hurry?” Jim asks, suddenly desperate to make light of things, not ready to face the situation for what it is now that the end of the game is dawning. Whatever horrible fates Jim had imagined for Bill whenever they’d had a falling out, it had never been this.

Perhaps Bill had seen it all along and that was why he’d let Jim walk right into the trap that was Testify. Perhaps he had also known he could never spare Jim the pain indefinitely because in this moment, he steps even closer and cups Jim’s face in his hand.

The gesture is laden with the same tension as that first guarded moment of affection in Jim’s rooms after the college Christmas do, Bill’s lips on his butter soft and aflame with cognac, their breaths angry and affectionate all at once.

Jim lets Bill guide him this time, too, lets him take hold of the barrel of the gun and guide it to the place between his ribs where Bill’s heart is nestled. Jim wonders if he can feel it beating through the metal (as though he is somehow still twenty-two with his ear pressed to Bill’s chest in the dead of night) or if that’s his own heartbeat slamming into his fingertips.

“Go on,” Bill says, “It was always your to take.”

When Jim pulls the trigger, it feels like being shot all over again.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](http://obfuscatress.tumblr.com/) or [twitter.](https://twitter.com/Shippress)


End file.
